


Erased

by Deannie



Series: Women on the Border [14]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Episode: s06e07 Once More With Feeling, F/F, Questions Of Consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 08:32:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8095243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: Tara watched from a park bench across the sidewalk, captivated, as the little raised bed of flowers sat untouched. Bees buzzed the area regularly eating from the flowers in the beds on either side, but it was like a barrier was there. Tara couldn’t see the barrier, of course, but if she let herself, she could still see the magic.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For the hc_bingo prompt: dubcon. Part of my Women on the Border series.

The bees wouldn’t touch the flowers where her magic had fallen. 

They were flowers a bee should want to eat from—it was a really pretty display. There were deep blue butterfly bush and dark red nicotiana, standing over Gerber daisies of every color. A carpet of lower-lying marigolds and white petunias finished off the bed, all penned in by quiet, white metal fencing.

Tara watched from a park bench across the sidewalk, captivated, as the little raised bed of flowers sat untouched. Bees buzzed the area regularly eating from the flowers in the beds on either side, but it was like a barrier was there. Tara couldn’t see the barrier, of course, but if she let herself, she could still see the magic.

Willow’s magic. 

From the moment she first saw her, Tara had known that Willow was special. Magic just seemed to flow through her, effortlessly. It was like Nature opened for her and let her have her way with it. The problem was, of course, that meant that, really, she could have her way with anyone.

Tara still couldn’t remember the fight Dawn said that she and Willow had had. It was like that part of her was erased.

_ Willow _ erased her. She erased her and made her something she wasn’t. And now a morning of sex and love and caring was nothing, because it hadn’t really been her who’d been doing it. It had been Erased Tara. There was a part of her she couldn’t get back and a part that knew that she’d never have had that morning if she could remember the night before.

God, Willow  _ knew _ what Tara had been through with Glory. She’d  _ been there _ ! And yet, for convenience—to avoid a fight that needed to be had—she’d done the same thing. Taken  _ her _ away.

And where did that leave her, really?

Did it leave her like those flowers? Untouched and untouchable because Willow’s magic had tainted her, had changed her? Did it leave her like Buffy? Trapped now in a reality that wasn’t the one she’d thought she was in?

They’d done that together, though, all of them. But Willow had wielded the power. Tara remembered the horror on Willow’s face when Buffy had said… what she said. That she’d been happy, at peace.  _ “I think I was in Heaven.” _

“I think I was, too,” Tara whispered, looking up as a butterfly fluttered by. Cabbage butterflies, her mother had called them: clean white and small and free. She wanted to be one, just for a moment. Free to fly away from all the turmoil in her heart, all the pain of Willow’s betrayal, the horror of what they’d done to Buffy, who was as unwilling and erased as she was, really.

The butterfly circled her, softly inviting, and Tara lifted a finger into the air, waiting patiently until the little flyer landed on the knuckle there, at the top of her pointer.

“Hello,” Tara whispered, voice rusted from the words she couldn’t say to anyone.

But maybe to this butterfly.

“No one’s ever made you do anything you didn’t want to, have they?” she asked it, wondering if it was a he or a she. “Made you feel things you didn’t want to feel?” The butterfly fluttered on its spot and flew off suddenly, heading toward that flower bed and, like all the other free things in the world, skirting around it to avoid the taint.

Tara rose, heartsick, but determined. 

“No one’s going to make me do it again either,” she promised. Willow had chosen her path, and Tara prayed that she’d be safe. Because she loved her. Loved her desperately and intimately and with every fiber of her being.

But her mind would never be another person’s plaything again. Ever. And she would never doom another person to hell on earth for the right to have what she wanted.

So like all free things, Tara walked around the flower bed and moved on.

******   
the end


End file.
